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Browsing by Subject "plant communities"

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    Aquatic Habitat Mapping in the St. Louis River Estuary
    (University of Minnesota Duluth, 2020-06) Reschke, Carol; Hill, Craig
    The goal of this project has been to use data from recent aquatic vegetation sampling in the St. Louis River estuary to refine aquatic habitat maps for four restoration sites and four reference sites that can serve as models for restoration design and management. These aquatic habitat maps are designed for use by resource managers working to restore impaired habitats. St. Louis River estuary restoration plans are part of the multi-agency St. Louis River Area of Concern Remedial Action Plan (RAP) to restore fish and wildlife habitats and remove impairments that led to listing the St. Louis River as a Great Lakes Area of Concern (MPCA and WDNR 2013). This 12,000-acre freshwater estuary was designated an Area of Concern in the 1980s because legacy contaminants and disturbances led to nine key impairments, including loss of fish and wildlife habitat. Current restoration plans rely on aquatic habitat maps prepared for the 2002 Lower St. Louis River Habitat Plan (Appendix 1, Map 1); the original aquatic habitat polygons were drawn using minimal data on aquatic vegetation (SLRCAC 2002). The classification of aquatic habitats used in the 2002 Habitat Plan was qualitative, based primarily on the extensive expertise of local fisheries biologists. Since 2008, biologists in Minnesota and Wisconsin have conducted field surveys yielding over 3000 samples for aquatic and wetland vegetation in 23 key restoration and reference sites within the estuary. The objectives of this project were to 1) identify restoration site mapping priorities and appropriate reference sites, and compile existing data on aquatic vegetation, water depths, and wind fetch as characterized by relative exposure index (REI) for the estuary; 2) run hydrodynamic models for at least four scenarios of river discharge and Lake Superior water levels and extract data on water velocities and temperatures at vegetation sample sites; 3) use multivariate analyses to classify aquatic habitats based on aquatic and wetland plant communities and associated environmental data, and prepare habitat maps and supporting data for four restoration sites and four reference sites; and 4) share progress on this project with estuary resource managers at least five times during the project period, at meetings of the St. Louis River Estuary Habitat Work Group.
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    Biodiversity increases the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate extremes
    (Nature Publishing Group, 2015) Isbell, Forest; Craven, Dylan; Connolly, John; Loreau, Michel; Schmid, Bernhard; Beierkuhnlein, Carl; Bezemer, T. Martijn; Bonin, Catherine; Bruelheide, Helge; de Luca, Enrica; Ebeling, Anne; Griffin, John N; Guo, Qinfeng; Hautier, Yann; Hector, Andy; Jentsch, Anke; Kreyling, Jürgen; Lanta, Vojtěch; Manning, Pete; Meyer, Sebastian T; Mori, Akira S.; Naeem, Shahid; Niklaus, Pascal A; Polley, H. Wayne; Reich, Peter B; Roscher, Christiane; Seabloom, Eric W; Smith, Melinda D; Thakur, Madhav P; Tilman, David; Tracy, Benjamin F; van der Putten, Wim H; van Ruijven, Jasper; Weigelt, Alexandra; Weisser, Wolfgang W; Wilsey, Brian; Eisenhauer, Nico
    It remains unclear whether biodiversity buffers ecosystems against climate extremes, which are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide. Early results suggested that the ecosystem productivity of diverse grassland plant communities was more resistant, changing less during drought, and more resilient, recovering more quickly after drought, than that of depauperate communities. However, subsequent experimental tests produced mixed results. Here we use data from 46 experiments that manipulated grassland plant diversity to test whether biodiversity provides resistance during and resilience after climate events. We show that biodiversity increased ecosystem resistance for a broad range of climate events, including wet or dry, moderate or extreme, and brief or prolonged events. Across all studies and climate events, the productivity of low-diversity communities with one or two species changed by approximately 50% during climate events, whereas that of high-diversity communities with 16-32 species was more resistant, changing by only approximately 25%. By a year after each climate event, ecosystem productivity had often fully recovered, or overshot, normal levels of productivity in both high- and low-diversity communities, leading to no detectable dependence of ecosystem resilience on biodiversity. Our results suggest that biodiversity mainly stabilizes ecosystem productivity, and productivity-dependent ecosystem services, by increasing resistance to climate events. Anthropogenic environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss thus seem likely to decrease ecosystem stability, and restoration of biodiversity to increase it, mainly by changing the resistance of ecosystem productivity to climate events.
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    Plant Communities of Hartley Park
    (University of Minnesota Duluth, 2019-09-18) Reschke, Carol; Nixon, Kristi; Pomroy, Deb; Barnes, Ray; Host, George E
    This project builds on and updates an ecological survey of Hartley Park in Duluth, Minnesota that was conducted in 2003 by consulting ecologist Ethan Perry to evaluate the potential to nominate the park to the Duluth Natural Areas Program (DNAP). In 2003 DNAP was a new program to provide legal protection to city-owned or private lands of ecological or geological significance. DNAP guidelines explain that land in Duluth can be eligible for this protection by meeting criteria in at least one of five categories. The 2003 ecological survey gathered information necessary to determine if parts of Hartley Park qualify for the Native Plant Communities category of DNAP criteria. Although Hartley Park was not designated under DNAP after the 2003 survey, the City of Duluth and Hartley Park managers recently wanted to update the maps and submit a DNAP nomination package in fall of 2019. The City of Duluth contracted with ecologists and geographic information system (GIS) staff at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI) to update the maps. This technical report describes the methods and results of surveys conducted in summer 2019 to update the Plant Community maps of Hartley Park. The project area for this map includes Hartley Park (660 acres) and 38 acres of adjacent open land that the park wants to evaluate for acquisition. The total area mapped in 2019 was 698 acres, with a wide variety of types of vegetation. To evaluate the quality of these vegetation types, the entire park was divided into patches or polygons of different plant community types, most of which were visited by ecologists, some more intensively than others. Access to some polygons was difficult due to steep topography and many trees blown down in a July 2016 wind storm. For these more remote or difficult-access polygons, air photo imagery was interpreted, and additional low-altitude air photos were acquired by NRRI staff using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). For native plant communities, the polygons were classified using the system developed by the MN DNR Biological Survey Program, described in the 2003 publication Field Guide to the Native Plant Communities of Minnesota, The Laurentian Mixed Forest Province. Since the names of the DNR communities are often long and not always descriptive of local vegetation, we have provided alternative cover names specific to Hartley (Table 1). Vegetation types not considered native plant communities (including conifer plantations, parking lots, ball fields, and areas dominated by non-native species) were divided into general land cover categories; these land cover types as a group are called “Cultural and other communities” similar to NOAA classifications of “Cultural” cover types so modified by human activities that they are not considered “natural” or native plant communities. The cultural cover types had a total of 168 acres. This report focuses primarily on the 530 acres of native plant communities in the project area.

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